Nikki Craft’s essay “Unmasking Male Privilege,” published in Making Violence Sexy: Feminist Views on Pornography, edited by Diana E.H. Russell, Teachers College Press, 1993, pages 221–226. An edited version of an article first published under the same title in the ICONoclast, Summer 1991, pages 5–9.

The essay is Craft’s firsthand account of the founding of the ACLU — Always Causing Legal Unrest — in 1991 and its Bellingham, Washington actions: the Sugar Babies protest at the Mt. Baker Theater during the sexually violent film Kill Me Again, for which Craft spent a night in jail; her arrest for tearing up $11.00 worth of Esquire magazines (theme that month: “Your Wife: An Owner’s Manual”), for which she served 23 days in the Whatcom County jail until — refusing to agree to abide by all laws everywhere as a condition of release — she was thrown out of jail, producing the headline “Feminist Thrown Out of Jail”; and the “Unmasking Male Privilege” action itself, in which seven activists in ski masks photographed the customers of a downtown pornography shop for publication in free speech leaflets. The essay documents the physical assaults on the demonstrators by two men, both convicted of assault in separate trials — one of whom, Christopher John Shelly, was arrested a month later for child pornography, child molestation, and rape of a child. It records the Bellingham Herald’s censorship and misrepresentation of the activists, the suspended sentence given to one assailant by the same judge who had sentenced Craft to 90 days for tearing magazines, and Diana Russell’s appearance as expert witness at Craft’s trial. The essay’s analysis inverts the privacy argument: men who demand privacy while consuming images built on the violation of women’s privacy are made, briefly, to experience being watched.

Part of the Nikki Craft Archival Project. Published Works.

Key words: Nikki Craft, Always Causing Legal Unrest, ACLU, Making Violence Sexy, Diana Russell, ICONoclast, Bellingham Washington, anti-pornography, radical feminism, feminist activism, civil disobedience, direct action, Esquire, American Psycho, ski mask action, Great Northern Books, male privilege, privacy, 1990, 1991, 1993

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